Why Is the Oakland Police Department Hiding the Truth About Its Violent Crackdown on the Occupy Protests?
Oakland police appear to have violated their own guidelines, and now they’re refusing to release documents to civil rights attorneys as required by law.
After three notably violent crackdowns on protesters in as many weeks, Oakland Police Department officials have refused a request by the ACLU of Northern California to release police reports documenting their use of force as required by law.
“We saw events that we found extremely troubling, and which violated provisions of Oakland’s own crowd control policy,” Linda Lye, a staff attorney with ACLU of Northern California told AlterNet.
After recent police actions in Oakland gained national attention, “there was a lot of lip service paid to transparency and accountability and the public’s interest in monitoring the situation,” she said. “But then OPD proceeded to say that it was invoking one of the statutory exceptions to the Public Records Act for the vast majority of our requests.”
Check out the rest here…
OPD Crowd Control and Crowd Management Policy below…
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4closureFraud.org
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OPD Crowd Control and Crowd Management Policy
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please pass this on for occupy groups!!
This was sent to me, so now I send it to you
Emergency Management and Interoperability Tactics of the Police and a Guide to Police Violence:
Most police agencies undergo federally mandated emergency response training in order to receive federal funding for their various needs. I have gone through this training, and offer a very basic, rough and quick rundown in the hope that the understanding of the police tactics will help in some way. The basics of Police Tactics are as follows:
· Division of labor: This seems obvious, but the cops in the field are just a single branch of the response, usually the smallest branch. Depending on their procedures, they can have anywhere from two to six or so different branches, but they will have divided the response into, roughly, these categories: Field Response, Logistics and Support, Command, and Communications.
o Field Response is the cops on scene with the riot gear/tear gas, etc. Further divided into smaller teams when needed, but generally operate with a single point of command in-field and branching levels of command under this single point.
§ The occupy movements are mostly comprised of this branch.
o Logistics and Support are the agencies, officers, and stations not on scene who provide help to the field support teams in indirect ways, supply them with gear and cars and interagency support. They typically have staging areas for the cops in the field to report to, organize at, and obtain important information from. Typically responsible for, during long-term emergencies, providing the officers with housing, food, and pay.
§ The various groups of people gathering food, bail money, and other supplies for protestors make up this branch.
o Command is obvious, but this is the real force behind the violent responses. The brass in the agencies and the individuals charged with leading emergency responses are the ones that authorize things like riot gear, tear gas, and plan attacks. Command will never be on scene, or usually even in staging areas set up by Logistics. Command is comprised of the leaders of entire departments, and a few individuals.
§ The occupy movements lack this branch for the most part (which as disadvantages and advantages).
o Communications is in charge of disseminating information between all the other groups. They carry the orders from Command to the Field Response and Logistics, and coordinate the movements of the Field Response. When one team is overwhelmed by protestors, they are the ones that send another team to assist. Usually will be off-site, though sometimes housed in large radio-tower equipped trailers.
§ Twitter, Reddit, and the various occupy websites fill this role, as do the protests themselves.
o The rule of Five: In general, most teams will not have further than five branches of responsibility. Teams may be broken up into smaller clumps of groups of five or less, and report to another person, who himself along with four others reports to another person, and so on. This pyramid-shaped chain of command applies to most of the above branches. It allows for maximum coverage and break-down of response and mobility while also allowing individual teams to have adequate backup. Not ALL agencies use this, but most will at least break themselves up organically into smaller groups that work together. You will almost never encounter a cop alone, he will have three to five other cops with him, all assigned to work together.
§ This is not something I have seen or heard of the occupy movements of using, to their detriment.
· Interoperability: The responding agency (usually city police) are not the only agencies involved. The police will be communicating to transit authority, EMS, fire, and utility companies where necessary. Consider the entire city to be organized and working together with the police. Do not rely on public transportation, do not even rely on common roads or thoroughfares to be open. State agencies will be called to bring in helicopters, if necessary, to give air-support to the police. Not all police agencies have helicopters, but most state police do, and they will activate them when asked to by the police for anything.
· Containment vs Dispersal: Contain means a lot of things but primarily it translates to 1) Keep them all in one place, 2) Keep them cowed, 3) Use intimidation and force to accomplish 1 and 2. A large, widely spread, chaotic crowd is far more dangerous than a huge clump of people neatly packed WHEN the cops have a numbers advantage.. When you clump up, it makes it easier for the cops to target you. The exception to this is when the cops are greatly outnumbered. Then the tactics change: they want to scatter you into disorganized sub groups so they have a strategic advantage. Keep this in mind: when there are more of them, they want you in one spot. When there are more of you, they want to break you up.
· How to (Not) Be Arrested: Know your rights: in most states, Failure To Identify To A Police Officer can occur with two different occasions. The first includes refusing to provide your name, address or other information when you have been lawfully arrested or detained, or when a police officer has reason to believe you may be a witness to any type of criminal offense. The second distinction includes the same circumstances but it is more specific to if you provide the wrong personal information to an officer. You don’t have to tell a cop your name or information UNLESS you have been arrested or he suspects you have been witness to a crime.
o Also, as SOON as a cop intends to arrest you and gets cuffs on you, your goal should be to make it as painless as possible for both of you. The more that you struggle, the faster other cops will come and begin to hit you. Kicking and screaming makes for good pageantry but could also seriously hurt yourself or the cop – and you don’t want to assault a cop (at least when he has you in cuffs). The sooner you are carted to the jail, the sooner the movement can help you post bail, and the sooner you can get back on scene. Adding resisting arrest and possible assault charges adds nothing to the protests.
This is not intended to be a tactical rap sheet for every agency or every cop. Not every agency will use the tactics I have outlined, but most major cities go through FEMA emergency response training and learn the same things I have and will use a similar method to respond. A good idea is to attempt to appropriate these tactics: they are proven to be effective for organizing large groups of people, especially the “rule of five” and the division of labor. From what it sounds like, there is already a highly organized division of efforts at the protests, and this is good.
Further organizing the protests into small groups is a good idea for a couple of reasons. If something really bad happens like in Oakland, when it’s time to disperse and re-organize, communication teams can send people to spread the word to other groups, and people evacuating the scene will have others that they know will be with them. I suggest also that a physical logistics team be set up somewhere off site. A physical gathering of people legally congregated someplace off-site to help gather resources like food and water and identify what places allow bathroom access, collect funds for Bail, etc. will be instrumental in helping the protests. Most importantly, by being off site they won’t be dispersed should the police respond with heavy violence like in Oakland and can quickly regroup the protests.
Interoperability: The responding agency (usually city police) are not the only agencies involved. The police will be communicating to transit authority, EMS, fire, and utility companies where necessary. Consider the entire city to be organized and working together with the police. Do not rely on public transportation, do not even rely on common roads or thoroughfares to be open. State agencies will be called to bring in helicopters, if necessary, to give air-support to the police. Not all police agencies have helicopters, but most state police do, and they will activate them when asked to by the police for anything.
· Containment vs Dispersal: Contain means a lot of things but primarily it translates to 1) Keep them all in one place, 2) Keep them cowed, 3) Use intimidation and force to accomplish 1 and 2. A large, widely spread, chaotic crowd is far more dangerous than a huge clump of people neatly packed WHEN the cops have a numbers advantage.. When you clump up, it makes it easier for the cops to target you. The exception to this is when the cops are greatly outnumbered. Then the tactics change: they want to scatter you into disorganized sub groups so they have a strategic advantage. Keep this in mind: when there are more of them, they want you in one spot. When there are more of you, they want to break you up.
· How to (Not) Be Arrested: Know your rights: in most states, Failure To Identify To A Police Officer can occur with two different occasions. The first includes refusing to provide your name, address or other information when you have been lawfully arrested or detained, or when a police officer has reason to believe you may be a witness to any type of criminal offense. The second distinction includes the same circumstances but it is more specific to if you provide the wrong personal information to an officer. You don’t have to tell a cop your name or information UNLESS you have been arrested or he suspects you have been witness to a crime.
o Also, as SOON as a cop intends to arrest you and gets cuffs on you, your goal should be to make it as painless as possible for both of you. The more that you struggle, the faster other cops will come and begin to hit you. Kicking and screaming makes for good pageantry but could also seriously hurt yourself or the cop – and you don’t want to assault a cop (at least when he has you in cuffs). The sooner you are carted to the jail, the sooner the movement can help you post bail, and the sooner you can get back on scene. Adding resisting arrest and possible assault charges adds nothing to the protests.
This is not intended to be a tactical rap sheet for every agency or every cop. Not every agency will use the tactics I have outlined, but most major cities go through FEMA emergency response training and learn the same things I have and will use a similar method to respond. A good idea is to attempt to appropriate these tactics: they are proven to be effective for organizing large groups of people, especially the “rule of five” and the division of labor. From what it sounds like, there is already a highly organized division of efforts at the protests, and this is good.
Further organizing the protests into small groups is a good idea for a couple of reasons. If something really bad happens like in Oakland, when it’s time to disperse and re-organize, communication teams can send people to spread the word to other groups, and people evacuating the scene will have others that they know will be with them. I suggest also that a physical logistics team be set up somewhere off site. A physical gathering of people legally congregated someplace off-site to help gather resources like food and water and identify what places allow bathroom access, collect funds for Bail, etc. will be instrumental in helping the protests. Most importantly, by being off site they won’t be dispersed should the police respond with heavy violence like in Oakland and can quickly regroup the protests.
Mercenaries are above the law, you know, like the Banks are. Refusing to release documents is what they do all the time.